Why does a leading Democrat want to cancel Thanksgiving?

0:02This is a global production. Democratic socialism in America and within the Democratic Party has undoubtedly been having a real moment, especially after as well the victory, of course, of Zora Mamdani in New York. And what the Democratic Party has done, or these group of people like Mamdani, as you say, are kind of injecting it with a sense of humour and lightness of touch. And I think it's having a profound effect. It's also deeply Trumpian, right? It's how Trump did politics, does politics, has reshaped politics in the content age. What the fuck's just happened to his hair? Where's all that come from overnight?

0:38You know, you've talked about your past positions that he keeps highlighting and, you know, obviously likely would continue to do so before November, should you win. One thing that they brought up as well was a post from you in 2021 where you said Americans should cancel Thanksgiving, should have done this in 1621. The post has been deleted. Republicans have been highlighting it. Do you still believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled? I'm a chef and one of the first meals that I made that was for the community when I was 16 was a Thanksgiving meal. I always think my hospitality background in owning a restaurant for seven, eight years, that bringing folks around the table to share conversation and build community is always a good thing.

1:29But Thanksgiving is also a time that's incredibly painful for many people in our communities. And so I think there I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, but views can evolve. And the position that I'm running for right now, and I think my background as a chef, will actually help me become a better governor that's able to bring more people to the table. That is Francesca Hong, who has quickly become a favourite for the Democratic Governor's Primary, which will take place on Tuesday. She is having to backtrack from comments she made in 2020, where she said, among other things, that Thanksgiving should be cancelled in America because it was an original super spreader event which spread European diseases and decimated Native American Indian communities.

2:20Yes, whether she wins in Wisconsin or not remains to be seen. But what it seems to signify is that maybe the Democratic Party is having its own MAGA moment. Is it going to become blue MAGA against red? Welcome to the News Agents.

2:45The News Agents. It's John. It's Lewis. And what's happening in America is fascinating because 10 years ago, when Bernie Sanders was kind of marauding the country and packing stadiums out, there was Bernie Sanders and there wasn't many others who you could say represented that left wing strand of democratic opinion. It was him versus the establishment, one man against Hillary Clinton. You look at America today and you see that the Democratic Party has got a whole bunch of people emerging into prominent positions who represent that strand of democratic socialism, which is kind of a almost a taboo word at one stage to have used in American politics, who are now vying for office.

3:35And whether people like the woman we've just heard from in Wisconsin win the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin or others that are also playing prominent roles, whether they win in November, will have a huge bearing on what the Democratic Party looks like in 2028 for who it selects as its candidate to be the presidential nominee. Yeah, this is obviously all coming against the backdrop of the midterms, which will be coming in November and will be here before we know it. The Democratic Party is finishing off, just like the Republicans have been, their round of primary contests, which, you know, select their candidates for the upcoming elections.

4:12And one of the notable things about this primary season has been the rise. It's a qualified rise, which we can talk about, but it's undoubtedly been the rise in the influence of an organisation we might end up hearing a lot about. And in fact, it's already, you know, being talked about a lot in American politics, which is a Democratic Socialist of America. This is a DSA. It's actually a very old organisation, quite old organisation. It's founded in the early 1980s, but it's basically been a pretty, you know, moribund, very, very sort of small, obscure force within American politics and democratic politics up until, as you say, John Bernie Sanders in 2016.

4:47But Sanders was at the time considered a deeply eccentric figure. He wasn't even a Democrat. He was an independent who sort of caucused with the Democrats. And without doubt, he moved the Democratic Party to the left. But since then and since his success, and particularly since the fall of the Biden administration and the failure of Kamala Harris in 2024, democratic socialism in America and within the Democratic Party has undoubtedly been having a real moment, especially after as well, the victory, of course, of Zoramamdani in New York in that mayoral contest. And you have seen a group of people, obviously had AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but you've seen in pockets across America, primary contests which have unexpectedly been won by either candidates which are directly associated with the DSA or candidates which are DSA adjacent.

5:39And the one which got a lot of attention, of course, over the course of the last week is a victory in Michigan in the Senate primary there of Dr. Abdul Al-Sayed against a candidate who had been backed by the Democratic Party establishment, Hayley Stevens, to the absolute hilt. Now, it was a narrow victory, but it was a deeply striking victory because Al-Sayed is, although he's actually not formally affiliated with the DSA, he's undoubtedly on the deep progressive left and is not likely the sort of candidate that would have triumphed in a state like Michigan, even with the Democratic Party electorate, primary electorate in Michigan.

6:18So there is no doubt that there is an energy and a force in progressive left-wing politics in America, which is really having a moment. There's something that I think is worth just drawing a comparison with, which is, you know, Bernie Sanders, when he kind of was going for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, there was an awful lot of him that was like Jeremy Corbyn. I mean, he was earnest. Some might say humorless, drab, serious, serious minded. And, you know, I'm going to give you a lecture on the importance of politics and, you know, it would be barked at you. It wouldn't be cajoled.

6:57There would be no humor. There'd be no laughter. And what the Democratic Party has done or these group of people like Mamdani, as you say, who we've heard something of are kind of injecting it with a sense of humour and lightness of touch. And I think it's having a profound effect. And you just, you know, if we just listen to some of what was said by Abdul El Saeed, who has won the Democratic nomination, as you say, for the Senate seat in Michigan, and that should be a winnable seat for the Democrats. It's a must win. It's a must win if they want to hold the Senate or take the Senate. take the Senate back.

7:37Just have a listen to him because Donald Trump said he was full of shit. A Sky News reporter caught up with him. Have a listen. Abdul, Donald Trump seems to think you're a gift to the Republican Party. What do you say to that? I'm a gift to the state of Michigan, God willing, and hope to win this election. And he says, if you pardon the language, you're full of shit. What do you say to that? At least I don't let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office. i that's fast on your feet there was no way that bernie sanders was going to deliver a line like that there was no way that you know jeremy corbyn would have delivered lines like that and there's just this quickness and i think that's giving young people a sense of energy and belief that this is something that is fundamentally changing in the democratic party yeah and um of course for the republican side um a MAGA a part of american politics which has undoubtedly deeply radicalized over the past 16 years sort of precedes trump with the tea party movement um in the early obama presidency where you saw kind of basically the republican party and i think there are parallels between what's happening to the democrats now you know in 2010 2011 this tea party movement this sort of uprising if you like from the sort of heart of the of the republican Party, particularly the Republican Party base, who felt that the Bush presidency had gone wrong, that it had engaged in all these foreign wars, that it had not been serious enough about the deficit, that taxes had gone too high.

9:03And then they were furious for all sorts of reasons, including, let's be honest, some of them racial, about Obama and the rise of the Obama presidency. And it radicalised, deeply radicalised the Republican base, which, of course, Donald Trump, in the end, managed to tap into that energy and corral it into the MAGA movement and gave birth to a kind of new political movement, took it on to the next level. I think you're clearly seeing in parts of the Democratic Party base right now, similar sort of forces. They're not the same. And for a start, the Tea Party movement was way better funded. I mean, you know, if you compare it to what's happening now, I mean, there were literally, you know, scores and scores and scores of scores of candidates that were endorsed across the United States.

9:42We're not talking about that now. You know, we're talking about a handful the DSA has got involved with. But some of the forces in the same in the sense that I think what you're seeing is that, you know, for your average Democrat, I think two things have happened for your average Democratic Party primary voter. One is you're absolutely furious with Donald Trump. You're furious that the Democratic Party has been unable to stem his rise. And although, yes, he was beaten once by Joe Biden in 2020, he has dominated politics now for 10 years. He has radicalised his own side. He's radicalised the Democratic Party side, right?

10:13Unimaginable, I think, to have, and what we just saw there we're laughing at with Al-Sahed there, great reply, great line. It's also deeply Trumpian, right? It's how Trump did politics, does politics, has reshaped politics in the content age, right? So what you're seeing is some of those same forces, a sort of visceral counter reaction to Trump. And alongside that anger against Trump, the fury that he has not been stopped, there is fury and anger in the Democratic Party grassroots. grassroots, that the Democratic Party establishment has not been able to stop him either. And a few and an anger and visceral fury on their side when they look at a kind of ailing, what has been an ailing Democratic Party establishment, you know, the Nancy Pelosi's, the Chuck Schumers, these octogenarians, sometimes nonogenarians in office who've dominated the Democratic Party for too long, clinging to a kind of centrist set of beliefs that many, many grassroots Democrats just believe have totally failed.

11:09They look back at recent presidential history and they go, we nominated a centrist in 2016. They lost to Donald Trump. We nominated a more economically populist Joe Biden, still reasonably centrist. We won, but there was a pandemic going on there, but was completely unable to hold the line and lost with another centrist candidate in 2024. So I think what we're seeing is, in a way, the Democratic Party grassroots and the politics of the Democratic Party finally seriously catch up to the age of Trump and trying to find a way for them to embrace the economic populism that Trump has dominated and has his own agenda for the past 10 years.

11:50And these Democrats saying, no, that is our agenda. And this is how we're going to portray it for the US. Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think the Tea Party movement was really interesting. And I can see the parallel you draw between the Tea Party movement then and what is happening now. I guess what I would say is the big difference between then and now is that the Tea Party movement was steeped in a long history of American thought about the size of government, government spending, deficits, all those things, the fiscal conservatism that was there. that was historically part of America and has always been there and a strong strand of American thought.

12:31I mean, the irony of MAGA is, of course, that Donald Trump is not a Tea Party person. He wants he loves big spending projects. He wants to splash the cash and kind of increase the deficit. And, you know, tariffs arguably is the complete antithesis of what a Tea Party liberal would want, which is free trade and, you know, no intervention from government at all. So that's what MAGA became. You're right. Donald Trump sees the energy. But for the Democratic Socialists, there's not been a real history. Where would you look to a presidential election and say, oh, yeah, that's where the Democrats did really well, because they came at it from the left, from a Democratic Socialist position and won.

13:12Now, you know, if you kind of go back to the most progressive periods of American history and you talk about, you know, Roosevelt and the New Deal. I mean, he started very cautiously and then sort of suddenly decided that he was going to kind of take the bull by the horns after the Great Depression. So I kind of just think that this is where we just do not know whether this experiment will fly or not with the Democrats going into an election where arguably the centre of political gravity in America is much further to the right than it is, say, in Britain. Well, I think that's also true. I mean, I would just say, I mean, although you're right, there is no great long pedigree of American socialism and many certainly successful candidates sort of actively wearing socialist credentials.

13:58What there certainly is and has been for a long time within the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party was once the party for a long time of economic populism. I mean, it was the Republican Party that was the party of the economic establishment, of the interests of finance, of capital and all those sorts of things. You know, the Democratic Party for a lot of its history had been and was the party of economic populism and if not socialism then certainly as you've already identified john with roosevelt unafraid or less afraid of interventionism in in the economy and wearing that proudly and i think that part of this at least is a kind of the democrats exercising an old reflex and being irritated by and i think they're right to that the party establishment has allowed and had allowed for a long time donald trump to own that space you know the democrats let's be honest the democrats for a long time in the post-Clinton era, even in the Obama era, they became associated with the economic status quo, with economic elites, with political elites, with coastal elites, all of those sorts of things, right?

14:57And this, I think, to some extent, is an attempt, an attempt by the Democrats or some of the Democrats to wrest away that mantle that they're from Donald Trump, that they don't properly believe to be his. And there was a great gaping opportunity at the moment for that, because Donald Trump is basically going around talking about the fact that he doesn't much care he's literally explicitly saying that he doesn't really care that prices are going up he's got some of his best allies saying well donald trump is best friends with billionaires but you know what some of those best friends employ you so you know be grateful to you know trump is actually resiling from and retreating from a lot of the populist credentials that gave him so much power and gave him such potency within american politics so in a sense i'm not surprised that there is an attempt or that there are some who are trying to sort of occupy that space and And if you look at, you know, I mean, the numbers of how much Donald Trump has become richer since becoming president.

15:51Corruption. It's corruption on an epic scale where he's, you know, two billion dollars richer than he was. And so you've got Democrats now thinking, God, we've got to be able to beat this man. And yeah, there's absolute frustration, fury, the conventional Democrats failure to take advantage of that. And what has been the voice? Who has been, you know, Chuck Schumer is still the minority leader of Democrats in the Senate. What has he done? What would you point to and say, oh, well, he's really made the argument or Hakeem Jeffries, you know, the minority leader in the House. What has he done? And so it is the mantle is being picked up by a lot of people on the left.

16:36and centrist Democrats seem to be struggling. I mean, there are some that are out there who are going to be a force when it comes to 2028. But at the moment, the most striking thing about the Democratic Party is the progress of these people, you know, like Zoram Amdani, like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. There have also been some terrible candidates as well. I mean, you know, Graham Plattner, who was going to be the Democratic candidate in Maine, who had kind of he was also meant to be one of these progressive firebrands. He had an awful lot of baggage in his past and was forced to resign in the end.

17:13And, you know, I think this is an important qualification, which is that there's a lot of people out there, particularly on the right. And we've seen Donald Trump. He stopped talking about socialism now. He's talking about communism and the rise of communism and so on. Now, it is also interesting, part of the background to this is fascinating polling, particularly with younger voters in America, showing that socialism is actually outpolling capitalism. I mean, these are quite abstract concepts, obviously, in some ways, but nonetheless, particularly among younger voters, socialism in America, or the idea of socialism, the abstraction of socialism, is gaining more and more ground.

17:48And this is very, you know, this is pretty new. I mean, it's pretty unusual beyond the certain sort of university educated kind of particular sort of subset. You know, we're seeing in the polling the idea of socialism gaining more popularity and capitalism increasingly becoming discredited. Now, that is also, I think, partly coupled alongside with Donald Trump. You can make an argument is one of the most socialist, probably quite not the right, the right quite well. But certainly there are certain policies. Yeah. You know, he's opening gas stations across east coast of America right now, which are basically federally owned.

18:18This is a guy who is not in favour of free markets and classic free market capitalism in a way that his Republican antecedents were. Right. This is a guy who in so many ways he might not want to recognise this, but has actually dragged American politics in an economic sense anyway, to the left. You know, there is not a classic free market party in the way that there was. This is a guy who imposes tariffs here, there and everywhere. He's mercantilist. He basically is cronyist. He's corporate. This is not the sort of Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, right? Or even of George W. Bush, right? So it's not surprising in one sense that you've got these two twin forces going on in American politics right now.

18:57You've got American capitalism, which on the one hand, in terms of like GDP per capita, is doing very well. And they are outstripping us and outstripping Europe. And even as we've talked about on the show before, the poorest state in America, Mississippi, per capita terms is way wealthier than, say, the UK is. And yet at the same time, most Americans don't feel it. The cost of living is crazy. And so capitalism overall doesn't feel like it's working, which is breeding this economic populism. And you've got a Republican president who is interventionist, basically anti-free market, and in that sense has sort of moved himself American politics on the economy to the left.

19:34So it's not surprising, I think, with those two sort of macro elements going on in the background that the Democratic Party is moving to the left on the economy. And there are some candidates who are finding great success arising from it. You know, after the 2012 election victory of Obama, the Republican Party went into this whole period of soul searching about why they'd lost two successive elections. And they came up with a report that was called the Growth Opportunity Project, the GOP, which is the initials of the Republican Party, the grand old party. And what that said was the party had to be more inclusive.

20:09It had to be kinder. It had to be softer. It was too hard edged. And that was the only way of winning. And Donald Trump comes along and says, this is all complete and utter bullshit. We're going to do it differently. We're going to be even tougher on Muslims. We're going to be tougher on minorities. And sure enough, you know, there was the old Nike slogan, which is impossible is nothing. In 2014, when I was in America, everyone was saying it is impossible for a Donald Trump figure to win the presidential election. Donald Trump did it in 2016 and won clearly in terms of the Electoral College. You go to today and the Democratic Party and there are many voices saying the Democratic Party cannot win with these sort of policies.

20:57And, you know, I have a certain sympathy. I have a kind of I doubt, you know, whether it's possible that a Democratic Party that is further to the left can win. But who is to say it's impossible when Donald Trump takes a presidency when he's got no experience, no real credentials for being in office other than he was the host of a TV show? I think the Democratic Party now think that there is a way through with people, you know, the likes of which we've been talking about. Yeah. And of course, we should say, you know, qualified to say there are primary contests that have happened in this season of primaries where the centrists have won.

21:35there's been plenty of them like you know so this is a this is a you know some people are talking about it as a democratic party civil war i don't think that's kind of completely off the mark um but it's one that is not all of the energy and all the momentum is not only running in one direction and of course of course the sort of places where there was a there was a danger for democrats of over learning i think there's our the zaron mambadani experience i don't think you can sort of overestimate how important he has been as part of this trend and as part of this energy because this is a guy who yeah he won in new york but has sort of dominated kind of left-wing politics in america since he has now he does it in a very smart way and you know i think there's an interesting contrast to be drawn between someone like mam danny and actually someone like al-sayed who has been pretty impressive over the course of the last week if you're going to have that sort of politics particularly in a somewhere that's not new york where obviously the kind of politics is very much in your favor but if you're going to win in somewhere like michigan i'm sure i'll say i'll say it knows this or you're going to win in somewhere like well as we started with like wisconsin you know these are purple states yeah this is not new york this is not chicago you know this is not la these are places where genuinely there will be lots of people particularly in rural areas they are terrified of socialism they're terrified of communism you know that that that is the sort of political backdrop that exists and particularly frankly if you've got a name like al-sayed or like hong and if you're gonna have that sort of politics which does have salience and can be powerful i think what we can learn certainly from the mamdani experience and potentially now from the al-sayed experience you have got to be a brilliant communicator which both of them actually are and secondly you've also got to be nimble about your politics and your previous positions and the problem with the person that we started with like francesca hong she reminds me so much of so many of those and you'll have covered so many of them john all of those you know more extreme republican era mega candidates who yeah of course they get through the primary election and then they cost the party massively not so much because of their politics but because they do not have the suppleness to adjust their politics So she was asked over the course of the last week about some of these comments in 2020.

23:51You know, we started it with Thanksgiving, which was hardly a kind of comprehensive answer or a quick, crisp answer. She was asked about her previous comments about defunding the police and about abolishing the prisons, which she made in 2020 because she said they were structurally racist. Now, even left wing voters, working class voters in particular, they will have no trust whatsoever, even actually in a lot of the big cities with those sorts of comments. Of course, there are questions about institutional racism within American policing. There always have been, of course, and all of these institutions which have to be addressed.

24:26And she sort of adjusted it a little bit. But our answers are sort of long winded and odd and sort of rambling. And if you're going to have politics and politicians from that end of the spectrum and you've made those sort of comments, you better have bloody good answers as to why you no longer believe those things. Otherwise, when it comes to the general election, you're just going to lose. Guess what? Because it's working class communities who would stand to lose most, by the way, from abolishing the police or crazy ideas like that. I've just been on holiday in Vietnam and I was reading a lot about, you know, reminding myself of the Vietnam War.

24:59And exactly to the point you've just made about, you know, being the working class and not representing the working class. There was a story from the 1968 Chicago riots where this kid is on the ground and he's being beaten by a cop. And the kid looks up at the cop and says, I'm fighting for the proletariat. and the cop picks up his baton and says, bang, I am the proletariat. And I think there is something that, you know, Democrats need to be careful that they don't look out of touch. Well, do you remember when we were at the DNC in Chicago a couple of years ago? And, you know, there were those sorts of protests outside.

25:37Some of them turned a little bit violent. And, you know, we had the absurdity, like the craziness and actually the outrage of watching some Democrat, well, I don't know how closely associated, they are with the Democrats, but they were certainly on the left, you know, left wing activists there. Attacking, screaming Nazi and KKK at black police officers, black police officers from the Chicago PD. I mean, this is this is insane. You know, I mean, it's actually that twisted. It's actually twisted stuff. But I remember, you know, asking one of them, how could how could you say that? I said, well, they are.

26:12They're upholding, you know, white supremacists. But they're black police officers. And that's the way to lose voters. with that sort of thinking. Now, cleverer politicians, and again, more supple politicians, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is a potential frontrunner for the Democrat 2028 presidential nomination. She's been addressing some of these more, this more florid period in American politics on the left, in what she calls woke one. Just listen to what she had to say about it. What do you make of those controversial statements? I'm sure you've seen. I mean, she's, you know, the Thanksgiving dust up.

26:44She says she doesn't, you know, still believe that, but, you know, the abolished prisons, abolish police, which is also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progressive candidates who have won. How do you get around that? Those are not positions that are supported by most of the group. Right. I mean, I think that a lot of these races, even right now, they'll have a tendency to be nationalized. But these races ultimately are local and all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate. Yeah, she's moved away from a lot of that.

27:23She's moved away from it. And I have a local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy. Woke one was crazy. Okay, that's true. And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now. Was it? I mean, did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, you know, No, I think that during this time and especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns.

28:01And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? So AOC, who was originally seen as one of the hard left members of the squad, as Donald Trump called a certain group of Democratic Congresswomen, you can see that she's kind of tailoring that, you know, woke one was mad, that she's positioning herself and probably will be an effective candidate when it comes to it.

28:50And there is just so much going on beneath the surface, I think, in American politics on the left right now. And obviously, this really matters in the sense that, look, if Al-Said wins, I think his election in Michigan, leave Hong out of it, assuming she wins tomorrow or not. But if Al-Sayed wins in Michigan, the energy that will give to the left in American politics will be enormous. I mean, not only will he become actually a potential candidate in 2028, but even if he's not, that kind of proof of concept of saying, look, this guy with that name. And there are some Obama echoes here. This guy with that name.